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June Entry: The Tower at Charm

In an effort to get my creative juices flowing again so I can finish my current consignment piece I figured I'd give this month's challenge a shot.

I'm a big fan of the Black Company series by Glen Cook and near the end of the first book the Black Company takes part in the defense of the Imperial Capital - The Tower of Charm. This is the largest battle in the history of the empire.

The Tower itself is described as an approximately 500' Cube of dark stone. Little other information is given on it other than there are 'battlements' at the top and that it was built around a smaller 'tower' that takes up approx one third of the space inside.

From the book...

At the time of the Tower's construction huge basalt billets had been imported. Shaped on site, they had been stacked and fused into this gigantic cube of stone. The waste, chips, blocks broken during shaping, billets found unsuitable, and overage, had been left scattered around the Tower in a vast jumble more effective than any moat. It extended a mile.

In the north, though, a depressed piece-of-pie section remained unlittered. This constituted the only approach to the Tower on the ground...

I'm mostly concentrating on the Imperial forces and defenses as the rebels are just way to numerous to try and include. Eventually I will add unit markers for the defenders and possibly the more notorious persona's.

Still a bunch to do on this. But the basics are more or less in place.

havent read the books, so my only ref is your text. Looking good - for now I have to comments - the shadow is a bit heay in the far end - and if the ruble shall be the difficulty equivalent of a moat, perhaps there should be some more?

By the description, I expected a denser litter of basalt, larger pieces and more angular/less organic.

The gunsight-looking formation around the tower... is that a wall or a walkway? Is it elevated over the ground around it? How high if so?

The shape of the shadow doesn't seem right if the sun is to the east-northeast and about 45 degrees (or any other angle). Is the shadow set to linear burn? You may want to try 75% back shadow (or less) and give it a 1-pixel gaussian blur when you're happy with it to make it look more diffused, and I'd try multiply to see if it eliminates that brown tinge. (Keep in mind that I'm colorblind, so I may be seing a brown tinge that doesn't exist!)

I don't see a brown tinge, the shadow's color looks good to me. I'm horrible with shadows myself, so I won't comment on the shape Like the others, I think more rubble is definitely in order, but it looks great so far. As usual, your textures rock.

The ' rubble moat' is no where near complete, I just had to take a break from working on the map for awhile. More than a few hours and I get 'burned out'.

I struggle with the shadows for large objects all of the time, especially directional ones. I've yet to find a easily repeatable process for doing them. So it'll probably get tweaked some before I call it finished.

@Immolate - I don't see the brown tinge you are referring to, so maybe your color-blindness is playing tricks

The 'bulls-eye' pattern around the Tower are slightly elevated roads (may need to reduce the bevel some). During the siege, the grassy areas around the tower are largely used for the grazing of various animals.

Here's how I do the shadows: every unique shadow-casting object of identical height should be on a different layer. In this case, I put your tower, the walkway below and the crenelations on different laters. Next, I determine the ground rules for the shadows. I typically put my shadows at 45 degrees and coming from SE, SW, NE or NW. Anything else is more calculation-intensive.

If I were going to do the tower, I would create a new layer above everything else, then ctrl-click the tower's layer icon. I then fill that with black. This gives me a black copy of the tower. Then, I filter/offset this new layer. If my sun is coming from NW as it is in my example, and at 45 degrees, the shadow will be exactly the same length as the hieght of the building. In this case I chose 334'. So I offset by +334 and +334. Next, on the same layer, I connect the outside corners of the tower and the tower shadow at high resolution, basically filling in the "between" shadow. This leaves a big glob of shadow on top of the tower, so I ctrl-click the tower layer icon again and delete the shadow on top of it.

Next I do the crenelations. I've decided they are five feet high, so I create a new shadow layer next to the first one and ctrl-click the crenelation layer icon. This is trickier because we have to do two shadows. One is on top of the tower, and one on the ground below. For the one below, we fill the crenelations with black and then offset them by +339, +339. To back-fill the lower parts of those shadows, we simply ctrl-click the crenelation shadow layer (which we're on) and "walk it back". First I zoom in. If you don't, you may walk back too fast. With the blinking lines telling me where my selection is, I hit the up arrow and the left arrow, which walks back the selection one pixel closer to the origin. Then I fill and go again, and again, and again, until my selection is fully merged with the main shadow. This technique is very useful when you have a very complex object that you need a shadow for.

I do the same thing for the crenelation shadows on the tower top, only offsetting by 5, 5 this time. Stamp the shadow, then walk it back. In the process, you'll wind up with shadow atop your crenelations. No worries, just ctrl-click the crenelation layer icon and delete that part of the shadow.

For the walkways, I did a three-pixel walk-back. Now this is important. When I was done, I merged the shadow layers together. They are all solid black at 100% opacity at this point. next I give the merged shadow layer a 1.0 pixel Gaussian blur and then set the layer property to multiply, 75% opacity.